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Bernie's fracking ban would backfire: Column

'No fracking anywhere' would mean job losses and higher bills for exacBernie Sanders is airing a television advertisement called "No Fracking Anywhere," a siren song for the 51% of Americans who oppose shale gas production that utilizes the technique

The Sanders plan would kill jobs and drive up utility bills for the people he wants to help.

Bernie Sanders is airing a television advertisement called "No Fracking Anywhere," a siren song for the 51% of Americans who oppose shale gas production that utilizes the technique. The advertisement appears as Sanders contests Hillary Clinton in primaries last week in New York and this week in Pennsylvania. Both states sit atop the Marcellus Shale, one of the world's largest sources of natural gas.

Rising public opposition to gas development led New York in 2014 to effectively to ban shale gas drilling — but it did not ban the use of natural gas. This has worked in large part because Pennsylvania, now America's second largest gas producer, provides a lot of the gas consumed by New Yorkers.

Thanks to Pennsylvania, New York could have both cheap gas and no drilling within its borders. As for the industry, it learned little from its New York defeat and continues to lose public support by attacking environmental regulation and stonewalling its mistakes.

As concerns about fracking mount, many people believe Sanders when he thunders that a ban is the right thing to do. In an ideal world it would be, because gas drilling is an industrial process that cannot be done without some damage to the environment.

Yet, as someone with a home in the Three Mile Island nuclear evacuation area, I sadly know that the real world of energy choices offers no perfect options but just unavoidable, uncomfortable trade-offs. In return for no fracking, the trade-offs include higher prices paid by consumers, more coal burned to make electricity, loss of payments to landowners and loss of jobs generated by the gas industry.

If fracking were banned everywhere, the supply of natural gas would plummet and prices for gas and electricity would skyrocket — because 33% of America's power is generated by natural gas (slightly more than by coal) and because gas generation is also often the price setter for the power market. Many consumers would pay about $500 more each year on their power bills. Half of the nation's families, those who also use gas as a heating source, would pay about $1,000 more annually.

Higher energy costs would be especially devastating for the poor, who often spend 20% or more of their incomes on energy. A fracking ban would worsen economic injustice and cause many utility shut-offs, a particularly ironic result given Sanders' focus on economic inequality. Even middle-income consumers, who now cheer "No Fracking Anywere," would jeer the skyrocketing bills when they arrived.

Apart from higher energy costs, a fracking ban would paradoxically put into the environment more soot, mercury, sulfur and nitrogen as well as carbon. Why? With gas made uncompetitive with coal, much dirtier coal-fired power plants would recover large chunks of the market share that they had lost to cheap gas.

Indeed, the market share of coal-fired power plants has fallen from nearly half in 2007 to one-third recently. As the nation switched to more gas, carbon emissions from power generation collapsed to levels last seen 25 years ago. Though Sanders' call to ban fracking is not intended to increase pollution or delight the coal industry, coal moguls would smile from ear-to-ear if fracking ended.

More coal mining and burning means more coal ash that requires disposal, and trouble lurks there, as experiences in North Carolina and other states sadly prove. And it would mean more mining water to be handled and treated.

Gas drilling and fracking since 2008 contaminated about 300 water wells with methane, including the water supply in Dimock, Pa., the subject of court cases and the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland. Yet decades of coal mining have left Pennsylvania with 5,000 miles of streams destroyed by acidic water discharges from coal operations and three dozen underground coal fires. The environmental risks from coal greatly exceed those from gas.

In addition to more pollution, a fracking ban would inescapably cost jobs. Higher consumer energy costs, higher costs for raw materials in the chemical and other industries, and a crippling of the natural gas industry would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. Just in Pennsylvania, the natural gas industry directly and indirectly created about 72,000 jobs in the third quarter of 2015, according to the latest data from state officials. A fracking ban would eliminate half of them or more.

Instead of banning fracking now and reaping nasty consequences from the unavoidable trade-offs, shale gas development should be strongly regulated, properly zoned and reasonably taxed. Tragically, the industry opposes all these policies, but they'd maximize benefits and minimize costs.

For the next 20 years, renewables and gas will combine to power America more cheaply and cleanly. By then, energy storage could be economical enough to allow renewables to work around the clock. At that point, a fracking ban could be possible — without today's nasty trade-offs of more pollution, fewer jobs and higher consumer bills.

John Hanger is a former member of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and former secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. He resigned in February as secretary of policy and planning for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf.